Stella also delivers atmospheric effects such as scintillation, refraction, and extinction right to your screen in realistic, spotlight, and the new photoplate sky display styles.


Scintillation? - Yes, the stars in this astronomy software even twinkle like the real stars! Subtler color gradations accurately reflect each star's true nature, and the complete Messier catalog in ImageIcons, animation modes, multiple toolbars, custom and online options, and the facility to display JPEG imagery in response to mouse-clicks on a wide range of celestial objects completes Stella's essential planetarium feature set.


Stella 2000 astronomy software sports 3 new and expanded star catalogues. A permanent level-one database, the HR Bright Star Catalogue (Hoffleit & Warren, 1991) is present in both the trial and licensed versions of the software, supplemented by a 7000 star selection from the ultra-modern ESA Hipparcos satellite sky survey.


But you can radically extend the scope of Stella's planetarium with the Hipparcos / SAO data extensions, all the way from magnitude 7.0 to those stars beyond magnitude 12 resolvable by that most popular of astronomical telescopes the 4.5' reflector.


As you've seen, this definitive Extended Edition of our Stella 2000 astronomy software package includes all 118000-odd stars of the Hipparcos catalog as standard but even this, as you're about to discover, is just for starters!